Molly Bit Read online

  Her phone buzzed. Area code 212. Hydrogen.

  “Molly,” Leonard Roth said. He sounded like a schoolboy. “How are you?”

  His sister, Emily, had been the prominent one. Magnetic, unstoppable, she’d been the company face. Throughout her audition for Human, Molly noticed how Leonard seemed to be bobbing in his grief, the little brother, suddenly grown.

  “I’m well,” Molly said. Was she a “well” person now? “How are you?”

  “Maybe you heard I threw a shit fit trying to get a hold of you, but now I feel much better,” he said. “Much, much better.”

  She wanted to say something about his sister, at least acknowledge it, but there didn’t seem to be room—or there had been, but it passed, sealed itself off.

  “Make It So,” Leonard said. “Have you seen it?”

  She had, a rough cut. The movie was supposed to have been released in mid-September, but after the eleventh, all the schedules were in flux. The new opening was the first week of October.

  “And have you talked to anyone over there at WB? Nick?”

  Nick Perlman was the president of Warner Brothers. Make It So was a mostly WB production. She had not spoken to him.

  “So that makes me the first,” Leonard said.

  “The first to what?”

  “The first to congratulate you.” Molly could feel him relax. It felt like the electric charge after a storm. “That seems appropriate. I think about Trust every day. You’re part of the Hydrogen family. And family always gets first crack, right? First dibs. First congratulations.”

  “Depends on the family.”

  Leonard Roth’s laugh was so practiced it sounded almost genuine.

  “You’re upset,” he said. “About Helen. What can I say? I was under a tremendous amount of… you know. I still am. Mistakes were made. I’m sure you’ve heard about her. About what happened.”

  “Yes,” Molly said, but she hadn’t. Helen Wheeler was a good actress. A little bland, but a good actress. Molly had no idea what Leonard was talking about. “It’s too bad.”

  “Yes, well, here’s the thing, Molly. That’s in part why I’m calling. Make It So—incredible. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Nobody could. I was at a screening last night in New Jersey. It tested”—he lit and exhaled the smoke from a cigarette—“high. But it’s not about the numbers. It’s about the quality of feeling that was in that theater. You know what I mean? The pulse.”

  Molly tried not to feel excited. She commanded it of herself.

  “You’re sure you haven’t spoken to anybody at Warner Brothers?”

  “No,” Molly said.

  “Good,” Leonard said. “Good for us. So what I’m going to do, Molly, is get on a plane tomorrow morning—very early tomorrow morning—and come see you in San Francisco, if that’s all right?”

  He understood her silence as something.

  “Obviously, with Helen’s situation, we need to replace her. I’m interested in having a conversation.”

  Again, she lacked the words.

  “Molly?”

  “Shouldn’t you be talking with Irene?”

  Every time Leonard took a drag off his cigarette, Molly dreamt of the one she wasn’t having.

  “Come on,” he said. “We both know you’re not going to be at Neidecker much longer. I know that. You know that. I’m sure they know that.”

  She’d had one meeting at CAA. She had been assured it was private. She was only exploring her options. She wasn’t even positive she—

  “You’re practically gone already, and that’s good. It’s a small pond over there. As I see it, you’re currently without representation. Listen,” Leonard said. “It doesn’t have to be anything more than a hello.”

  He asked about Warner Brothers again.

  “No.”

  “And where are you staying?”

  “With Abigail Kupchik,” Molly said.

  “Right-right. How do you like that,” Leonard said. “Good old Abby.”

  * * *

  Abigail stared through a foggy eye at the alarm clock in her bedroom and did the math. She had been “napping” for three and a half hours. Her sheets and underwear were soaked in sweat. She was cold. The darkness of the room implied one a.m., but it was 5:30 in the afternoon. She heard Molly in the kitchen (was she doing the goddamn dishes?) and said quietly but out loud, “A fucking movie star.”

  Her head gonged. Today was the wrong day to get so drunk the night before that she’d forgotten where she’d stashed her Valium. Abigail tried to think it out logically. She must have come home last night and thought to herself: I’m not doing any more Valium, my whole problem is Valium, and then hid the rather (in the end, compared to everything else) harmless little pills somewhere. She definitely would not have flushed them down the toilet because even in her blacked-out state she would have known that, come tomorrow, she would want a Valium, and anxiously need to find them. If she hadn’t been in such a hurry earlier, late for the airport and Molly Bit, none of this would be happening. In a way, it was all Molly’s fault. There was too much time in between last night and this afternoon to remember where she’d put her pills. Abigail turned on the table lamp. She dug her hand inside her cluttered nightstand drawer and pulled out a loose Percocet. She blew on it once, twice, and swallowed that down instead.

  She missed the good old days, when she was able to pretend that she wasn’t a total fuck-up, but the time for that sort of denial had long since passed. Even in rehab (all three times) there was still a nagging part of her that whispered, You don’t really belong here, you’re just having fun, you’ll grow out of it. Then time passed. She was twenty-nine years old now. She was not ancient, but she was beginning to resemble it: her face, her saddlebag hips, her tiny beer gut. Simple subtraction told her she’d been doing this to herself for fifteen years. There was no getting around it. She had a problem. Everything was the same as it had ever been.

  Inexplicably, like a little present she’d left for herself, there was an unopened beer in the middle of the shower. It was a twist-off even. Drinking the warm beer as the cold water soaked her hair seemed necessary. It cleared her head. Life was putting together the fragments of memory and intent into some sort of appreciable order, into some sort of form, and then presenting that form to the world. You had to remember, Abigail remembered, why you were doing the things that you were doing, otherwise people sniffed out the fact that you were a total failure. Not everyone needed to know you were barely a person, especially not your soon-to-be-movie-star-friend washing dishes in the kitchen. It was her fault your shower was cold. The whole scenario made Abigail wonder: Who exactly were you narrating to when you narrated like this? Who was the audience for this type of voiceover? What sort of movie were you in? Comedy? Drama? Thriller? What was the motherfucking genre?

  She couldn’t write—was absolutely unable, blocked—but her mind still worked that way, like a screenwriter’s, because she was one, whether she produced a single word or not. The last script she’d written was Echo Chamber, all set to shoot in a month’s time down in Los Angeles. Molly had been attached to star since before a single word had been written, and her name (Abigail would say it, “Molly Bit,” as if she were sprinkling pixie dust on the small-time producers she was able to wrangle) was the only reason the movie was getting made at all. Without Molly, there was nothing. No movie. No career. No life. Considering all of that, the voiceover asked, was it any wonder Abigail was annoyed with her?

  She finished her shower, made up her face, and found Molly in the living room, laid out on the couch, reading scripts.

  “When was the last time you saw Days of Heaven?” Abigail asked.

  It took her twenty-five minutes to find a parking spot, and, by the time she paralleled into a space just shy of a fire hydrant, the fog was back, particled and drifting through the air like slow-motion spit. At dusk, San Francisco grew cold, assumed the color blue. Walking into Foreign Cinema, the Percocet hit, and suddenly her eyes felt ru
bberized in some way. She’d slept with the host a few months back, and he greeted them immediately. Most of the Foreign Cinema staff were film people, or at least film buffs (some of them were Bay Area actors), and they all—down to the bus boy’s turned head—recognized Molly, probably from Initiation, or maybe even Trust. It wasn’t so long ago when they’d been impressed by Abigail too.

  The handsome front waiter led them through the crowded restaurant out into the alley. The movie was being projected onto the wall of the adjacent building. Thanks to the space heaters, and Terrence Malick’s color scheme, the outdoor dining room glowed. Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard were as tall as the three-story building to the right; their projected arms and torsos wavered like grass against the pocked gloss of the cement. There was no sound, but it didn’t matter.

  “A good tattoo would be of Sam Shepard’s face,” Abigail said.

  This was an old game of theirs.

  “Young Sam Shepard or old Sam Shepard?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Abigail said. “I would jump his dead bones.”

  “Where would you get it?” Molly asked.

  “On my face.”

  “Like your whole face?”

  “Yes,” Abigail said. “Then my face would be Sam Shepard’s face.”

  Molly gave a stranger across the room a closed-mouth smile.

  “Or maybe you can get it on your neck,” she said.

  “Right,” Abigail said. “Like a Latin King who went to the Actors Studio.”

  “Or on the inside of your bottom lip,” Molly said.

  “Totally,” Abigail said. “So every time I made out with a guy it would be like I was making out with Sam Shepard, but only I would know.”

  Maybe it was the fact that they were only a half-day into the visit, but their patter felt forced, like an imitation of what it used to be. Abigail stared at Molly and could not see the girl she once knew. Molly was thinner. Her wrists and arms appeared more delicate. Someone on Beverly Drive was styling her hair now. She wore a sheer green top with a short collar, and a four-hundred-dollar pair of jeans.

  When they’d first met, Abigail had seen herself in Molly Bit. Trust had been a love letter to the girl Abigail had once been. As Molly crossed her legs, and leaned confidently back in her chair, Abigail no longer saw the resemblance. When the waiter came with their first drinks, she asked him to go ahead and bring her another Stoli martini.

  “To the future,” she toasted.

  “And the past.”

  “Tell me everything,” Abigail said.

  Her role in Initiation was small, but important. Molly had had four scenes in the movie, three of them with Harrison Ford.

  “He spoke about you, you know?” Abigail said. “In Interview.”

  “I read that, yes,” Molly said. “That was nice.”

  “What about the other guy? The young guy?”

  “Jean Philippe?”

  “Yeah, him—the sexy French guy who looks like Marlon Brando. Who do you think I mean? Did you? You know?”

  “I’m married, Ab.”

  “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “You’re missing out on all the perks! It’s your God-given right to fuck your hot French costars,” Abigail said. “How is Jer-Rod, anyway?”

  “Jared is okay, thankfully. I mean, he’s in New York. He was there.”

  Abigail listened to Molly’s 9/11 story, but heard it as only that, a story, one of the hundreds she’d listened to in the last two weeks. Molly’s was about a man named Jared, who was her husband. The scenario was that he was in New York to do a play. The subplot was that he resented and maybe hated his wife. The inciting event was 9/11. He goes down to Ground Zero and finds courage and self-worth among the rubble and destruction. Abigail would have to set the ending elsewhere, she knew, maybe jump ahead in time to when he’s with his new wife, the one who’s better suited for him. The last shot in a movie like that is always the ocean. The audience sees the man’s back. There’s a little kid running out to him maybe—or the new wife’s pregnant. One or the other. Death is rebirth and all that shit.

  Her second martini came. They ordered salads. The waiter lingered awhile, filling up their water glasses. Clearly, Abigail thought, he was now fully updated on who was at his table. In some ways, the film and theater scenes in San Francisco were more up to speed than in Los Angeles. Molly was an actress who was entering the mainstream from the cooler, more independent fringe. That sort of outsider status appealed to SF, a city eager to absorb the new thing a moment before it hit the wider culture, before whatever it was—a band, an actress, a writer—“sold out,” a term Abigail herself now often used.

  Molly smiled at someone again. Her full lips stretched across her teeth.

  “Is that happening a lot?” Abigail asked.

  “Is what happening?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Yes,” Molly said. “More often. Since the profile. Sometimes I’m wrong.”

  “Are you wrong now?”

  “I don’t think so,” Molly said. “There’s this mother-daughter over here.”

  “Should we tell the manager?”

  “Ha-ha,” Molly said. “You’re funny.”

  “Who’s joking?” Abigail asked.

  There might have been sound to the movie after all, Abigail realized, only the restaurant was too loud for her to catch it. Her head went dizzy for a second, and then it felt as if her brain was wobbling inside her skull—or as if she had died, donated her body to science, and now her brain was inside a jar of formaldehyde, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing. Molly appeared to Abigail like someone beyond the glass.

  She asked how Irene Neidecker was.

  “She’s fine,” Molly said.

  “Does she know I hate her?”

  “She’s aware. Although I don’t quite get it.”

  “You ‘don’t quite get it’? Her agency dropped me. That’s the same thing as her dropping me.”

  “She’s been good to me,” Molly said.

  “Who isn’t good to you?” Abigail asked. “I’m not talking about you.”

  There were times when the words that fell from her mouth surprised even her. The worst were cruelties shot out like dislodged pieces of corn. What could she do about that, though? I mean, seriously. What could she do besides shut up, and hope the person across from her hadn’t noticed? Now it was her turn to watch the movie.

  “Whatever happened to Brooke Adams?” Abigail asked. “Is she a cautionary tale, or just a regular person? Where’s the waiter?”

  Once upon a time, Abigail had been able to chart her drunkenness, mark her different moods like they were colors on a wheel. Nowadays, her mind resembled the industrial-grade espresso machine she owned and didn’t know how to work. Steam would shoot out from here, water from there, grounds went all over the place, and it kept making a clanking sound while pouring out sludge. After Echo Chamber, Abigail knew she would never direct again. All of that was over. They couldn’t stop her from writing, but what did that matter?

  She understood everything now. Movies, Abigail thought, were only images, and maybe a little bit of sound, and they would go on being made with or without writers. Movies were dreams, and the dialogue in dreams was either nonsense or nonexistent, half-mumbled sentences blown out into the darkness and forgotten.

  “Who needs a writer?” Abigail said. In her head, the machine started shaking violently.

  Their salads came. They ordered entrées. Molly wanted to know what she’d meant.

  “About what?”

  “About not needing a writer.”

  “My mind’s not right,” Abigail said. “I don’t want to get into an argument about the crap being made today in Hollywood. I hate people who say that. I’m a person who says that. It’s pseudo-intellectual garbage. I’m full of that. I hate people who go to the movies and say how much they hate the movies. I hate people.”

  “I need writers,” Molly said.

  “You need a c
amera pointed at your face, is what you need. You need a camera pointed at your face like I need a gun pointed at mine.”

  Molly pretended that she didn’t understand her.

  “I want someone to shoot me, is what I’m saying,” Abigail said.

  She was getting very drunk, and it was almost fun, watching Molly’s memory work. It was sort of like watching her act. Abigail knew about Molly’s father, and her father’s father (drunks were like biblical characters: malicious Phil begetting stoic John begetting violent Sam). Molly wasn’t going to rush in and try to save her. Abigail admired the way her friend’s face grew hard, like a cooled piece of glass.

  “You’re a mess,” Molly said.

  “You don’t even know. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  At the bar, Abigail thought: Where had all the money gone? There was so much of it, and now it wasn’t there, like someone had pulled a bank heist. The forty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month mortgage had seemed inconsequential a year and a half ago. Bragging, hadn’t she used the phrase “drop in the bucket” when talking to her mother? On what planet was fifty-four thousand dollars a year a “drop in the bucket”? She’d had to put up nearly as much to take the apartment off the market. Still, that left hundreds of thousands… but then there were the taxes, and the BMW, and her student loans, and her mother’s chemo treatment, and the twenty-eight-day rehab at Hazelden for her brother, Paul, who had disappeared off the face of the Earth since then, and who was maybe—and just as well should be—dead. And then her own drugs, which were expensive, don’t ya know, in the same way her Aunt Bernice might complain about the price of milk.

  After all of that, after the million, Abigail had two thousand dollars in the bank, and nothing that anyone in the entire city of San Francisco could possibly refer to as a source of income. She loathed thinking about it. It was all so self-pitying, so hopeless. And it was all Leonard Roth’s fault.

  Those rewrites would have made her into something that she wasn’t: a pusher of middle-of-the-road tripe, tugging on the heartstrings of suburbia. Her head swelled with the idea.

  “I made the mistake all women make,” she told the bartender. “I opened my mouth.”